Former electric bus garage and re-charging station for the Brighton, Hove and Preston United Omnibus Co Ltd

25 Montague Place was built as a charging station and garage for electric buses by the Brighton, Hove and Preston United Omnibus Co Ltd in 1908/9. It was designed by local architects, Charles Clayton and Ernest Black.

MATERIALS: the building is of stock brick construction with painted masonry dressings. The pitched roof is formed of patent glazing (glass held in slim extruded metal glazing bars) at the apex and eaves, with slate-covered timber boarding in between; the whole is supported by slender steel trusses. Doors and windows are timber.

PLAN: the building has a simple rectangular footprint, nine bays long and one bay wide, and a pitched roof, orientated with its long sides facing north and south and the shorter, gabled, sides facing east and west. The main entrance is to the west, facing onto Montague Place. The east end bay to the south is cut back diagonally from the lower face of the wall into the pitch of the roof. This is an original feature and may have been to allow light into a corner where other earlier buildings were tightly built up around it. Internally the building is open to the underside of the roof; it was originally entirely un-subdivided, other than a single toilet cubicle in the far north-east corner. This cubicle remains, and overhead an office has been built on a small, partially free-standing mezzanine. A second small mezzanine has been built as a tyre store in the south-west corner, with an office in-filling the space below. These mezzanines and their associated offices are not of special interest.

EXTERIOR: the entrance front has a shaped parapet gable with a painted masonry coping, and a plinth of brown-glazed bricks. There is a large, central, sliding double door, flanked by a window opening to either side with red brick dressings, a painted masonry lintel, and moulded brick sill (also painted). The windows are boarded-over internally and externally, but may survive in between. Above the sliding doors is a tripartite Venetian-style window opening, with painted masonry dressings, a cornice, and segmental pediment. The windows have been removed and the openings filled with concrete block-work. The area in front of the sliding door is paved with 'Candy's' brick paving.

The north and south elevations have timber, horizontally hinged, six-light casements, with segmental brick arches. In the north elevation there are two further sets of double doors – one to the west, which is hinged and probably intended for personnel; and one to the centre – these are sliding doors on a slightly smaller scale than those to the front. Both sets of doors are blocked-up internally.

INTERIOR: the interior is open, except for the mezzanines, with painted brick walls. The roof trusses have diagonal braces and their ends rest on brick piers with rounded corners. There is a ridge vent in every other bay.